David Dawson is the best thing in Stephen Unwin’s revival of a play that in 1924 provided Noël Coward with a huge hit. As Nicky Lancaster, a druggy young composer, Dawson delivers a finely detailed performance which exposes the layered neuroses of a character intent on hiding from himself.
Nicky disintegrates while his racy mother Florence (Kerry Fox) frolics with her new man, Tom. Florence is desperately vain. She considers herself exotic, though her life is merely pampered and gilded — marked by a reluctance to embrace adult responsibilities. Fox swoops around the stage in flowing robes or elaborate dresses, and she revels in Florence’s splashy superlatives, but it’s a stylish interpretation rather than a truly moving one.
Passing judgment on his entire social class, Nicky claims that “We swirl about in a vortex of beastliness.” Dawson captures that swirling, erratic loucheness — his taste for nose candy intended to hint at other, unspoken appetites.
Eventually he confronts his mother, in a conscious echo of the famous closet scene in which Hamlet insults Gertrude. The result is a moment of real potency in a production that otherwise feels a bit underpowered.
James Dreyfus as a middle-aged queen scores laughs with his ability to combine stinging barbs and an almost drowsy glumness. Yet what’s lacking, Dawson apart, is a sense of the characters’ dangerous charm. Coward writes probingly about power games, the hazards of success and the dynamics of enchantment. But here there’s not enough sparkle or fluency, and not enough intensity either.
I’d also question the decision to include two intervals in a piece that could comfortably be played straight through. True, there are a couple of demanding set changes but breaking the momentum makes the play feel brittle and slight.
Until March 2 (0844 821 556, rosetheatrekingston.org)
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